Free Murder by Reflection by H. F. Heard Page A

“I’ve told you, being mailman of a city you’re bound to know people—you see their mail and their faces when they take it. Two things I know, and to you I’ll add a third. She’s not his mother—they have some queer past back of them. Her mail’s always full of stuff forwarded to a Miss Ibis; yet I’ve never seen another white woman around the place. And, thirdly, she’s just winding him up, as though it were a white shroud, in that period piece she’s made of the place. We’re not an inquisitive town, thank God, but they do shun us as though if we knew we’d want to run them out of the place. And it’s just that that bothers me.”
    â€œYes, it is the way to get people to suspect the worst on the least evidence.”
    â€œNo; our people wouldn’t do that, but the more tolerance there is—and thank Heaven we out here have,” Doc waved his vigorous hands, “a fine latitude in every sense of the word—the more it’s natural to ask people, as they are so free and have no one to fear, not to be secretive.”
    â€œUnless there is a real secret?”
    â€œWell, granted she’s adopted him—there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.”
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œWell, what I fear is just this. I think she may be going queer in the head. Going queer in the head doesn’t mean always going weak—unfortunately, far from it. And to add to the subtle mess-up, he’s the weak daydreaming fantasist. She rules him and he submits and half likes it and half deceives her. I’ll bet he dreams and then she, with her queer unbalance, rams the dream into hard fact. He doesn’t like that—dreamers don’t.”
    â€œPremature publication,” murmured the researcher.
    â€œWell, now he’s kicking, not really openly, but as you might say under the table, and she’s grim. He’s playing hookey from that great white schoolhouse in which she has him all day, the one lonely pupil under the old governess’ eye. He’s been going off with the real schoolteacher—seen ’em again today. If it goes on like this she’ll be putting him into uniform so he can’t go out and lose himself in a crowd.”
    â€œWell, we let dreaming dogs lie.”
    â€œI’m not for having a case of hydrophobia in the place.”
    â€œThat’s strong language.”
    â€œNo; our little burg is new. The Herons, or whoever they are, have made, in their ostentatiously quiet and exclusive way, not a splash but a sort of great white swelling on the city’s side. Why, it’s almost enough in itself to bring down your tribe on us—the publicity photographers. Remember that issue not so long ago back in one of the big photo weeklies? Just guying us, to make the old crabbed East feel that we were just a set of loose-necked lightwits. It’s real bad for a growing burg to get called names and be written up as notorious. And if on the top of our being written up as a home for cranks—the new Wild West trying to out-willy old Williamsburg—there was also a hundred-per-cent unhealthy human-interest-story—if she went off her head and imagined, as she might with all that period stuff about, that she was the divorced and banished ex-Empress Josephine …” Doc warmed with prophetic fervor to his theme and under his excitement recalled history he hadn’t thought of since college. “Oh, by gum, what publicity we’d be in for! There’d be guide-accompanied pilgrimages to see the place, and our poor little burg would be busted. I won’t have it, not if I can help it, and I won’t have them, just because they are a little odd, hunted out, just because they might, very well might, do Aumic bad mischief. But if something isn’t done we’re taking a risk, and I won’t take it.”
    Doc had discharged so many ruling negatives that he was